Sarah Resnick

Nettel is a mother, and she seems to be saying that ‘normal mothers’ do think ugly thoughts – or rather, that there is no such thing as a ‘normal mother’. There is a strong tradition of works that connect maternal ambivalence to horror tropes – Rosemary’s Baby, The Fifth Child, We Need to Talk about Kevin – but Still Born is different.

Rikers was constructed to replace the grim complex of jails and asylums on Blackwell’s Island (now called Roosevelt Island); and Blackwell’s too was built to replace an older discredited jail. Again and again, the city government has promised to remedy the inadequacies of its carceral system. And each time the new facilities have filled up, subjecting more and more people to wretched conditions.

The Candy House is set partly in the future, yet seems to be animated not by what might happen but by what already has. It’s an ambivalent but not unoptimistic portrayal: Jennifer Egan doesn’t try to pick out the most terrifying implications and use them to drive the narrative, but instead weighs our fears about technology against our capacity to adapt to enormous change.

There is no world-transforming event that severs past from present; no survivors charged with finding a safe haven or with the daunting responsibility of rebuilding civilisation from the rubble; no prelapsarian world before the contaminating event – a place that was more ‘natural’ or more free. Here the catastrophe plays out in slow motion; over time a multitude of small events yield profound change but this shift is not always visible to those living through it.